This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

Strategy is difficult to see and not easy to talk about, because it happens over time.

To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we’ve defaulted into.

Who will we become, who will we be of service to, and who will they help others to become This is strategy.

A strategy isn’t a map—it’s a compass. Strategy is a better plan. It’s the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better.

Once our basic needs for food, shelter and health are met, most people dance with three conflicting desires: • Affiliation • Status • Freedom from fear

If you want to understand why someone makes a choice, look for what people actually want, not only the proxies and substitutes they say they want.

The number on the car’s speedometer isn’t always an indication of how fast you’re getting to where you’re going. You might, after all, be driving in circles, really quickly.

Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.

Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. It’s not only a solution that gets a result. It’s arguably a better solution—the least complex and clearest way forward.

Elegant strategies use systems. Even when they set out to change the system, they don’t fight it directly but use the system as a tool to change the system.

The strategy gets better as you grow. Anyone can sprint, but elegant strategies are something that you can maintain.

Systemic advantage defeats heroic effort. Heroic effort is thrilling, but long-term elegant strategies rarely require miracles on a daily basis.

They’re simple to explain and difficult to stick to. Over time, the pressures to vary from the elegant strategy increases—a thousand little compro...

Buckminster Fuller taught us that to fundamentally change something, we must build a new system that makes the existing system obsolete. Balance this temptation of building a new system with the insight from Carl Sagan that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Human-built systems have elements in common. Generally, you’ll find: • Boundaries—they begin and end somewhere • Benefits—people voluntarily engage with a system because they believe in the promises it makes • Bystanders—often, people who don’t want to be in the system are still involved in it • Information flows—a shared language and expectations creates trust and efficiency • Stability—the system offers its participants a reliable picture of the future • Protocols—there are shorthands, processes, and methods of how things are done • Roles—participants in the system seek or gain status and affiliation through their actions • Resilience and feedback loops—when something disrupts the system, it works to push back and regain equilibrium • Convenience and efficiency—even though systems aren’t perfect, they offer participants outputs that encourage them to support it • Side effects—every system also creates outputs that aren’t ideal for non-participants or those that are part of it. And so we find systems like: • Big-time college sports • Starbucks • Religious practices • The chocolate industry • Your local volunteer fire department • The community orchestra • The dating scene in certain parts of Boise, Idaho

We’ve lived with them so long they have become invisible, but systems are everywhere. Systems shift our perceptions and our actions, and they don’t always offer us what we want or need. So why do they stick around? Status quo—when people coordinate into networks and groups, our individual aversion to certain kinds of change is multiplied, and so the default becomes keeping things as they are. Sunk costs—once we’ve invested our effort, money, and emotions into something, it’s hard to let it go, even if it might not be what we need. Interoperability—there are practical reasons for things to work in the way they do—connectors that connect, languages that are understood, and procedures that maximize efficiency. No one wants to buy a phone that doesn’t support Bluetooth. Status roles—the hierarchy benefits those that are at the top (who have power) and they work to maintain it. They also sell everyone else on the idea that the system is the best way for them to achieve status as well. Affiliation—culture is “people like us do things like this.” Humans find solace, satisfaction, and safety in community, and our desire for affiliation maintains existing systems.

Cultural systems evolve, layer by layer. In 1759, Josiah Wedgwood used new production techniques to bring the world a refined, mass-produced set of china and pottery. In 1843, Ada Lovelace did the groundbreaking work that informs computer programming to this day. John Wanamaker pioneered the price tag in 1861. By 1911, Frederick Taylor had published his ideas on scientific management, dramatically increasing productivity and quality. In 1951, Lillian (Vernon) Hochberg began her direct mail campaigns. The ubiquitous steel shipping container, first used in 1956, made shipping finished products around the world far more reliable and cheaper as well, enabling companies like Walmart to eventually transform retail. The toll-free number, launched by AT&T in 1967, connected consumers directly to companies, allowing them to use credit cards, launched in 1950, to buy things directly. Ethical email marketing, created by Yoyodyne in 1992, opened the door to electronic ordering, which was amplified dramatically by the adoption of web browsers a few years later. And then Amazon wove it all together.

DNA tests, passports, digital surveillance, rankings, membership lists, and SAT scores are all transformative because they surface data and turn it into information. Information changes systems.

Other schools creating easy-to-fill-in applications for high-scoring students, simply so they could reject them and improve their metrics

All other things being equal (and they were), the houses with visible meters used one-third less electricity than their neighbors.

In 2003, Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken reported on slave labor in the commodity chocolate market. His initial plan was to use publicity to shame the government and large chocolate companies to change the system. His frustration with the system led him to become a producer, and he founded Tony’s Chocolonely (named this way because he was the lonely voice speaking out). Tony is now one of the largest chocolate makers in the Netherlands, with nearly 20% of the Dutch market. Their chocolate is fully vetted, from bean-to-bar, offering consumers a different story, a more delicious option, and a better way forward.

culture is the driver of most systems, and culture is the result of the interactions between and among people.

Strategies stumble when they depend on someone with power dictating how things will occur.

Here are a few things about games that are generally true: • You don’t have to enjoy the game for it to be a game. • You’re playing a game whether you realize it or not, and seeing the game helps you play it better. • The outcome of a game often has little to do with how much you want to win. • Everyone playing the game sees it differently. • Some games are easy to quit, other games are forever. • Not all players follow the same rules or have the same goals, even when playing the same game. • No game stays the same for long, because playing the game changes the game. • Short-term gains can lead to long-term losses, and vice versa. • Sometimes the best way to win is to help others succeed. • Large games are made of smaller games, all the way down. • Most games are not fair, and some games cannot be won. • The most valuable skills in one game may be useless in another. • Some games become easier as you win, others more difficult. • You don’t always have to play the game you’re offered. • Multiplayer games sometimes conceal themselves as two-player games. • We often spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.

The reason people have difficulty understanding the nature of evolution and the science of Darwin or even of compound interest is that we have trouble seeing time.

Often, we go from yesterday to today as a bystander, floating on the currents of change. But when we are at our best, we actually create our future with intent. The future counts on us to make it better.

Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.

A series of 17 questions shines a light on the work to be done. It brings tomorrow forward to today, right here and right now, allowing us to articulate a strategy. • Who are we here to serve? • What is the change we seek to make? • What are our resources? • What is the genre we’re working in? • Who has done something like this before me? • What systems are in play? • Am I changing someone’s status? • Why would anyone voluntarily choose to be part of this work? • What will they tell their colleagues? • Who gains in status, affiliation and power by supporting this work? • Will early support translate into more support later? • Where is the network effect? • What do I need to learn to make this work? • Who do I need to work with? • Where is the dip and when should I quit? • What will I do if it doesn’t work out? • How much is enough?

“Simplify, then add lightness,” said Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars.

As Michael Porter has pointed out, a strategy isn’t a goal. And a strategy isn’t a list of tasks. A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete.

Tactics require skill in the moment and can consume us. Strategy is easy to skip, because we’ve trained our whole life for tactics.

Strategy is a philosophy, based on awareness of our goals and our perception of the systems around us. Tactics are the hard work we do to support our strategy. But great tactics don’t help if the strategy is working against us.

Strategy is a compass that helps us to take action when we’re uncertain, to build networks when we’re alone, and to persevere until the world we live in becomes the world we imagine.

At the time, the Secretary of Transportation was Elizabeth Dole. Serving under Ronald Reagan, she didn’t want to be on the hook for ordering the car industry to do something it was lobbying against. So she ordered that unless more than half the states made seat belt use mandatory, she would order passive restraints installed in all new cars. The car companies didn’t want to pass on the considerable expense of passive restraints, and saw that altering their position to seat belt laws was a smaller shift to the system they were part of. After Dole’s ruling, it only took five years for more than 70% of the states to pass a law.

In 1983, Esther Dyson began editing a small newsletter: the real kind, on blue paper, sent with a stamp, to paying subscribers. By 1987, it came out every month, and cost $700 a year to subscribe.

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…

When you serve the smallest viable audience, your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

Every strategy depends on being conscious of the change we seek to make and the systems that can amplify or impede our progress.

When we get compensated for creating value in a way that enables us to do it again, we’ve found a business model.

A useful business model has a few attributes: • It gets easier over time. Past success makes future success more likely. • It’s a welcome contribution to the lives and projects of the people who are paying (in time or money) for the work. • It’s resilient. When the world changes, the model adjusts and persists or even thrives.

The journey to a business model is an investment, it doesn’t work the first day. We find a strategy, and then spend time and money to go from an idea to a generative, persistent and scalable engine of growth. While it doesn’t work the first day, it needs to work eventually. Time is the unseen driver of strategy.

Time flies like an arrow. If I break an egg and scramble it, it can’t be unscrambled and put back in the shell. A student learns a new skill, an organization builds a community, a company builds an asset. We move forward relentlessly.

Fruit flies like a banana. If you want to attract the flies, it doesn’t pay to order them to appear, or even to insist. Placing a ripe banana on the windowsill is enough to create the conditions for change to happen.

A few years ago, Lisa Nichols was sitting with her 87-year-old grandmother. “Lisa,” her grandmother said, “when you’re my age, your job is to sit in a rocking chair and tell people the stories and lessons of a life well lived.” Then she looked at Lisa and said, “and at your age, your job is to live a life worth talking about.”

The business model is our job. It’s the way we create value for others and get compensated for it—the work might be the change we seek to make, but our job is to be able to get paid to commit to it regularly.

When we do our work as a professional, we show up to solve a problem for people who know they have a problem and who have the means to pay to solve it.

Some of our work is unpaid. It builds an asset. Our reputation, our experience, our network of trusted partners. Some of our work is directly related to our business model, and we charge a fair price for it. And often, we create value without regard for whether it matches our model.

Strategy helps us see that now is also easily extended. We can include yesterday and tomorrow in our experience of what’s right in front of us. As we grow up, we learn that investing in tomorrow is smarter than always insisting that we get something today.

The Iroquois Confederacy lived by a simple principle: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”